The Time for Democrats to Get Serious About Medicare for All is NOW
The Democratic Party needs to make Medicare-for-all a serious campaign issue for the 2026 mid-terms lest it condemn itself to perpetual losses.
The millions of Americans who lost their lives unnecessarily due to for-profit health insurance companies’ avarice so far hasn’t moved the needle. History has repeatedly demonstrated that some of society’s most pervasive issues do not get the attention they deserve until an authority figure, someone on the higher rungs of the social ladder, or of some notoriety, dies.
Unfortunately, it has come to this: the murder of a health insurance executive re-igniting discussions about the exploitative and dysfunctional American healthcare system.
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s death in front of the midtown Manhattan Hilton earlier this month has precipitated messages of “good riddance” toward Thompson as a symbol of “a universally despised system run by ‘heartless vampires’ who routinely refuse care in exchange for bloody profit.”
As Abby Zimet wrote in Common Dreams:
The pitiless response by tens of millions of their victims: Wanted posters, judging the shooter “too hot to convict” and grimly declaring, “Thoughts and prayers are out of network.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren explained, “Violence is never the answer, but people can only be pushed so far.”
How many more people have to die or be forced into bankruptcy before the United States joins every other industrialized nation in guaranteeing healthcare as a basic human right?
Now that the convicted felon is returning to his old job, and republicans have a (very slim) majority in Congress, the Democratic Party needs to make Medicare-for-all a serious campaign issue for the 2026 mid-terms. It could mean winning back Democratic seats by impressive margins--or condemning the party of Franklin Roosevelt to perpetual defeat ad infinitum.
This month, following the killing of Brian Thompson, Nation of Change published a piece reporting that trust in the for-profit health insurance industry has hit an all-time low, and that, according to a recent Gallup poll, 62% of Americans favor a national healthcare model.
The piece explains:
Between 2000 and 2008, a consistent majority of Americans believed it was the federal government’s duty to ensure universal healthcare. However, opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during the Obama administration caused support to dip, reaching a low of 42 percent in 2013.
Ironic considering the ACA (“Obamacare”), often maligned as “government insurance,” actually handed more authority to the very same predatory health insurance providers from the which the American people needed protection.
However, the piece continues:
In recent years, public opinion has shifted back toward supporting government intervention. This year’s 62 percent marks a significant increase from 56 percent in 2020. Notably, this growing support spans party lines, with 32 percent of Republicans now favoring government responsibility — up from 22 percent in 2020 — and 65 percent of Independents agreeing, an increase of six points. Among Democrats, support remains overwhelmingly high at 90 percent.
California Rep. Ro Khanna stated after Brian Thompson’s murder:
Democrats will regain trust by standing up to special interest insurance companies and fighting for Medicare for All. The current system is broken.
As Thom Hartmann, author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, stated:
We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
We would be remiss of we didn’t acknowledge Congressional Democrats’ and the Biden administration’s progress, however, because it isn’t like they have been silent on this issue.
Since taking office, the Biden/Harris administration has:
•Invested $12 billion in new funding for women’s health research
• Capped out-of-pocket expenses for pharmaceutical drugs at $3,000
• Lowered the cost of hearing aids by allowing them to be made available over the counter;
• Launched the American Rescue Plan ARPA-H initiative for advanced
research on cancer and other diseases
• Reignited the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative with the goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half over the next quarter century
13 million families covered under the Affordable Care Act are seeing health insurance costs decrease by an average of $800 a year, and three million more Americans are now insured.
Most “surprise billing” medical charges from out-of-network insurance providers are now banned under the “No Surprises Act”.
Medicare is negotiating for more affordable pharmaceutical drugs.
Insulin costs are capped at $35 per month for almost four million diabetic seniors on Medicare.
But while we are seeing progress on the healthcare front, the United States still ranks dead last in access to care and overall health outcomes, according to a recent report from The Commonwealth Fund, an organization that studies countries’ healthcare systems.
The study, titled “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System,” ranks ten countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States — according to access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
What the report finds is that, still, “The United States lags its international peers considerably on health system performance.” It concludes:
The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the under performance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.
The study explains that, while none of the aforementioned countries ranks highest in every performance area — and the US actually ranks second in care process — the nine other nations outpace the US in outcomes, particularly since we spend the most for healthcare of all the other industrialize nations with national healthcare systems.
The report explains:
The ability to keep people healthy is a critical indicator of a nation’ capacity to achieve equitable growth. In fulfilling this fundamental obligation, the U.S. continues to fail.
Most people don’t know — partly because the for-profit corporate media companies wouldn’t dare speak ill of the for-profit health insurance companies advertising on their networks — that the United States spends about 17% of GDP on “healthcare” — more than any other country in the world.
By comparison, Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan average around 11%. Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia between 9.3% and 10.5%.
In America, health insurance premiums comprise about 22% of all taxable payrolls.
That number would be reduced to 10% with a Medicare-For-All-type system.
Right now, combining Medicare, Medicaid, insurance premiums, and out-of-pocket costs, we are expected to spend about $52 trillion on health care during the next decade.
But Medicare-for-All would eliminate premiums and out-of-pocket costs, reducing the price tag to between $20 trillion and $36 trillion over the same period, the same amount the federal government set aside for corporate welfare since 2008. After the 2008 financial crash, we granted $700 billion to big banks. The Federal Reserve committed between $16 trillion and $29 trillion to large financial institutions. Over the past dozen or so years we have spent in the neighborhood between $20–35 trillion on corporate bailouts. During the pandemic, lawmakers handed $4 trillion in relief to large corporations.
All that time we could have been providing healthcare.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Medicare-for-All could save the country up to $650 billion per year.
Skeptics, of course, naturally resort to the fear tactic of equating national healthcare with “Soviet-style Socialism!”
No country included in the aforementioned Commonwealth Fund study is a third-world banana republic where people are dying in the streets. They’re civilized liberal democracies — the same that outranked us in the last report three years ago. And these countries are proud and fiercely protective of their national healthcare systems, of which there are many permutations.
Great Britain, for example, practices socialized medicine, in which the government owns and operates most of the healthcare providers and doctors are government employees. Although technically a single-payer system, it is just one model.
Canada and many other nations, on the other hand, contract with private providers in which doctors still run their own practices.
This is the difference between “socialized medicine” and “single-payer.”
They are not “rationing care,” as opponents often claim.
Arguably, healthcare costs being the primary driver of bankruptcy, a distinction we share with no other country, is a form of rationed care.
If you have ever tried getting an appointment with your primary care physician “as soon as possible,” you’ve experienced it.
If you’ve ever tried to schedule a test doctor ordered and had to wait weeks or even months, that’s rationed care.
It’s even worse when trying to get in to see a specialist — that’s if your for-profit insurance company approves the visit.
There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada.
The best single-payer model, however, is in Taiwan.
As Thom Hartmann explained in The Hidden History of American Healthcare:
Today, everybody in Taiwan is fully covered for doctor and hospital services. Everybody has a driver’s-license-like healthcare card, which accesses their entire medical history. They can book a doctor’s appointment on any computer terminal in the country, and the entire cost of the system is a bit more than 6 percent of Taiwan’s GDP (in the United States, healthcare consumes 24 percent of our GDP) because there are no insurance company intermediaries sucking profits off the system.
Getting there won’t be easy, especially with well-entrenched special interest groups with unlimited funds pumping lies and propaganda into the media and our political arena.
But just as we have seen movement on same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization, police reform, voting, and the minimum wage, we will move the needle on this too — as long as we don’t cede ground to the other side buying into industry talking points.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka “Obamacare” that Donald Trump and a republican House gleefully tried to repeal — despite his now claiming he “saved it” — is a major step in the right direction.
But it isn’t enough.
We need a single-payer national healthcare system.
We will have a single-payer national healthcare system — if we are serious enough about it.
We will end the danger, embarrassment, and fiscal irresponsibility of putting CEO profits ahead of people’s health.
Healthcare should not be a for-profit industry, like the auto or entertainment industry. It is a basic human right our government has a duty to provide, facilitate, and maintain.
How many more — patients or CEOs —have to die before act?
If we don’t, we are going to continue cannibalizing ourselves.